


drowning is easier

by eyemoji



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: big ol' spoilers for today's episode, i had to. i just had to.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-23 18:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11995890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyemoji/pseuds/eyemoji
Summary: a ten-step guide to killing your former commander





	drowning is easier

**Author's Note:**

> i  
> i hope you like this.

**i.**

he’s good at games.  _ brilliant _ at them, really; at least he  _ would _ be, if he ever let himself win. operation (on top of a jet plane with maxwell,) shipwide poker, the goddamn questions game-- he always seems to  _ just  _ fall short,  _ just _ miss the endgame,  _ just _ ...lose.

 

kepler does not have this problem.

 

**ii.**

today is different. today is  _ important _ . today is the result of him studying a battlefield only he can see because he devised it all on his own; today is the result of weeks and months of heart and flesh and blood and tears and stone, the stone canvas he painted his nonchalant face on and used to have the others warm up to him in the most unobtrusive way possible-- and yes, this includes kepler, even if the colonel didn’t know it until it was too late. 

 

today is different because she’s not here to see it.

 

today wouldn’t be happening if she was.

 

**iii.**

jacobi closes his eyes and he hears her voice,  _ daniel _ , floating in his head. it’s not the way he remembers her, exactly-- it’s all wrong, floaty and disembodied and  _ soft _ , somehow, and he doesn’t mean in volume. the real maxwell was soft-spoken sometimes, yes, but she was still  _ bold _ , opinionated,  _ herself _ . she’s the maxwell who is-- wasn’t afraid to slap the sense right back into him and who holds-- would hold him tight once his sanity was restored. the number of nights that voice has been that last thing he’s heard before drifting off to sleep… _ god _ , he can’t even begin to count. he knows her, knows who she i--  _ was _ , knows what she sounds like. and this? isn’t her. she would order him around, albeit gently; she would call him  _ dummy _ and lightly punch him-- he rubs his shoulder where the blow would have landed; the absence of a bruise hurts him more than her fist ever could have-- give him the instructions one more time without so much as a sigh as she dumbed down the technical language to “jacobi-speak” (a term of his own coinage, not hers.) there’s something squishy about her, like this, as she reminds him of what he can do, her voice insistent yet lacking its usual vigor, and with every word she says to him the harpoon in his heart tugs a little harder, sinks a little deeper, its barbs scraping his atrial walls and drowning in the tears that have collected in his ventricles. the pain makes him stronger, he thinks, closing his eyes and forcing back the pressure in his lacrimal glands.

 

in the lower right chamber of his heart, some more saltwater drips down to join the stagnating pool.

 

**iv.**

he’s heard the story of captain lovelace. how she arrived on the hephaestus, a stranger in her own command. how she was full of paranoia, of oh-so-heartbreaking levels of vengeful distrust. 

 

it’s in her file.

 

and oh, how many times he’s read  _ those, _ from not long before he stepped foot on the urania; driven to read, to memorize, to imbue every damn inconsequential detail of drivel into his very being so that when the time comes to strike, he won’t even have to think. it’ll be a part of him. it’ll be reflex.

 

was it  _ reflex _ that drove lieutenant minkowski to pull the trigger on maxwell’s head?

 

for all his droning and demands, there was a teensy-weensy speck of a grain of an ounce of truth in kepler’s incessant workhorsing of them to be prepared on the mission files: an idea’s come and lodged itself into the sticky hollow that used to be a semilunar valve before his heart began to drown in sorrow. it isn’t dangerous then; no seed is anything but benign. unless-- potential. feed a seed enough, give it water and food and light and  _ blood _ and  _ pain _ on the darkest day of one’s own history and-- you will create a monster. after all, ideas are at their most deadly when they spread. in jacobi’s case, the blood flow through the passage begins to weaken and stutter as the idea grows, cancerous, into a plan.

 

captain lovelace had a dead man’s switch.

  
**v.**

he trusts you. he trusts you and you know why and you also know why he goddamn shouldn’t; how dare he presume to know you well enough? to assume that however much her death pained you you’d remain loyal and by his side, teeth bared and sharpened and polished but never turned to bite the hand that fed you, once, long ago, when you was starving and desperate and anything looked good? if kepler is a lion, what with his ambiguous social cues and murky motives and nearly always perfectly executed strikes, then you are a mongoose: fierce, loyal, willing to take on even the most deadly of creatures to protect what you love. and you love her, you  _ do _ , and you which you had told her more when she was still around to hear it; just because you would never be down for kissing her doesn’t mean you couldn’t have thought of her as the sister you never had, that she didn’t think of you as the brother she deserved.

 

she deserves better than this, you know, than being flushed out an airlock, forever to be forgotten as soon as the plug is pulled on this mess of a station ai; as if goddard would preserve her, even in an inception-type download of the mother program’s memories. there’s a pain squeezing you around the chest, burning a hole into your ribs that’s only intensified by the silent drops running down the inside of your cheek, boiling your blood as they slip into your thoracic cavity, and you don’t understand it, you don’t understand it at  _ all _ , and you know that if she was here she wouldn’t get it either. but she’d be here. and she’d lean her cheek against yours, take your hand in hers, and sit, quietly, pressed up against you until it all went away. now, he’s robbed you of even that.

 

he’s robbed you, you say, as if he made the call, as if she didn’t stand her own damn ground, stubborn to the fucking end, and urge you to go ahead with carrying out your delightfully nefarious little plan, as if you didn’t press the button that ended her life, didn’t make the single most important decision of your life and  _ blew it _ . literally.

 

but this-- this is a dangerous path to walk if you want to get anywhere, somewhere, as long as it’s better than this, as long as you can escape the pain. you can’t truly run away from guilt; you know that. doesn’t mean you can’t try.

 

**vi.**

he deserves to suffer. this, he is sure of.

 

_ “now shoot him.” _

 

**vii.**

the fear in his eyes is almost delightful and jacobi feels the tiniest spark of fear travel down his spine along with the absolute  _ rush _ that comes with seeing the slight widening of kepler’s eyes when the words leave his lips, register by finally reaching his eardrums. the fear isn’t out of the thought of killing kepler, his boss for nearly seven years, who’d caught him at the bottom of the dregs of hell and carried him out to, well, not to the light, but to some perfectly respectable middle ground, and all he’d ever asked for in return was his hand.  _ he seems to be losing a lot of those, lately, _ he thinks, and it brings a smirk to his face, wipes away the real fear lying beneath: that of becoming kepler, of turning out like him, all business and no emotion no love no loss.

 

being in charge; jacobi thinks he can get  _ used _ to this, likes the power inherent to the words “my office,” has to hold himself back from licking his lips at the thought of the scotch that undoubtedly resides somewhere in a hidden stash on the urania-- it’s no balvenie, but it’ll do, to drink away the leftover emotions once maxwell  _ and _ kepler are both dead and gone. fitting, somehow, that his first and last acts towards kepler, his colonel, will involve rich malts paid for at kepler’s expense. he likes it. kepler would appreciate the alignment, he knows.

 

drowning in space is easy. he really ought to stop having so much in common with eiffel.

 

**viii.**

speaking of eiffel, and the captain, for that matter, jacobi can reassure himself later with the thought that he never intended to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. he doesn’t understand exactly how dangerous this makes him, this playing god; he thinks it a virtue, a thing for them to look back upon and applaud him for. what, does he think he’s going to lead the crew? this isn’t  _ that _ kind of coup.

 

he hasn’t thought that far ahead, if he’s honest. ironic, considering how meticulously the rest of his plan was detailed out. it’s his “time to be the bad guy again,” but what he thinks is bad is just misdirected good and what he’s devoutly convinced is good is what makes him the scariest type of villain, and he’s surprisingly hard to pin down, isn’t he, he of the sharp tongue and caustic spittle and bitter, bitter words. he’s a joker gone sour, the other end of pagliacci, and honestly, if he took a page out of his sophomore year fashion statements, the hephaestus would be in need of their own batman startlingly quickly.

 

he’s willing to go all or nothing, but there’s no hero to swoop him and force him to choose. he wants it all, with his not-bomb and kepler, shaking in his boots in front of him, and minkowski’s wavering finger on a rotating barrel cursed by gravity. his heart begins to reach fluid capacity, and still the tears flow and flow, more and more and more. greedy jacobi, greedy daniel. he just wants his sister back. he just wants the people who took her away to  _ pay _ . stereotypical b-list movie villain. that’s him. a heart three times too small for all the rage it has inside.

 

**ix.**

there are only two people that matter. the number used to be one, and isn’t it strange how such a category can expand with loss? it’s illogical, and yet makes perfect sense. tragedy is a breeding ground.

 

it’s also funny how much more kepler matters to him dead than alive. loyalty, it seems, does not equal to love in any shape or form. kepler knew this, but he forgot. jacobi is just learning. it’s liberating, in the way college was liberating, freeing him from the clutches of his father and his old life and all the goddamn expectations and it’s funny how he’s managed, over the years, to get himself into the same exact scenario, only kepler was always a far more attractive choice than his father for reasons both obvious and unknown. 

 

another funny thing: how little the threat of minkowski’s six rotating barrels, hovering a foot away from his chest, his bleeding heart, matters to him. he ought to be more scared. what’s wrong with him? no one can say; the science officers are both dead. and someone else is about to be.

 

if he dies, at least he won’t have the problem of what to do  _ afterwards _ . if he dies, kepler lives. maxwell goes unavenged. but he’ll see her again, assuming they go to the same place, assuming there’s a place for them to meet at all. for the first time in his life, he hopes there is. 

_ “dummy,”  _ he hears her voice, somewhere in the back of his skull, even as minkowski begins to voice aloud his own turbulent fears, rooting him in place so he can’t put an end to it, can only continue the dreadful countdown that seems to follow him wherever he goes on the station. he counts because it reminds him of her. he counts because it hurts. 

 

her voice is more excited and it sounds like  _ her,  _ like  _ she’s _ there, here,  _ with him _ for the first time since-- the softness of her voice, too faint to hear, the dying breath she was never prepared to take, that was robbed from her by the same woman who is attempting to rob him of his peace.

 

_ “let her,”  _ says maxwell.  _ “i can fight my own fights. i’m a big girl.” _

 

_ you’re twenty-eight, _ jacobi wants to scream,  _ a baby; and besides, you can’t fight  _ any _ fights. not anymore. _

 

_ “i’m fighting yours right now, aren’t i?” _ she says, and that’s the first crack in the dam that is daniel jacobi and his ninety-nine bottles of deliberately ignored feelings on the wall.  _ take one down, smash it on the ground; ninety-eight bottles-- _

 

_ “listen to her.” _

 

“that won’t help.”

 

then what will?

 

“i don’t know.”

 

there’s a pause then, slight, but  _ agonizing _ to jacobi, in his heightened state, in his feelings of  _ maxwell’s here _ and  _ maxwell’s dead _ and  _ both _ .

 

“but between the two of us, i think we can figure it out.”

 

**x.**

you give in. you always do. weak. weakling.  _ screwup _ .

  
_ it’s okay though _ , you think, as you let minkowski lead you out of the room, deflated, nearly leaning against her but catching yourself just in time: your heart-- it beats again.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are nice. so are kudos. this sounds like a poem. something something rose.  
> it's 5:50 am. i have not slept. welcome.....to sleep deprivation central.
> 
> i'm at justasmalltownai on the blue blog place if you wanna like, scream at/with me or somehting.


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